


Puddles of Faith

by forgotten_silence



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Gen, Post canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-03-22 02:20:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13754232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgotten_silence/pseuds/forgotten_silence
Summary: Somehow, before they’d had kids, he’d never thought he would ever get annoyed with Kirishima Touka, but here they were; Haise Sasaki was annoyed. At Kirishima Touka. [Post-canon// Series of semi-related one-shots and drabbles]





	1. Chapter 1

“Are you  _sure_ you’ll be fine?” Touka asks again. She is sitting on a chair by the front door.

“Mamaaaaaaa,” comes a cry before Haise can reply, and their daughter pushes past him and latches herself onto her Touka’s dress, “Don’t gooooooooooo!” she wails.

Touka gives Haise a look which clearly says,  _see, I_ told _you you couldn’t handle them._ It is a bit condescending, to be honest, and Haise looks right back at her, challenging her to say anything out loud.

“Mama’s going to be back soon Hikari,” he says to his daughter, and ignoring Touka’s expression, takes Hikari’s arm and tries to pull her away from Touka’s dress- it is rather like pulling apart two balloons which are glued together without popping either of them- he cannot pull on her arm hard enough to hurt her, and she has no intention of letting go of her mother’s dress. “I’ll let you watch that pony cartoon if you come with me,” he says in desperation, and just like a little angel, Hikari lets go of Touka’s dress and gives him a toothy grin, and the next thing he knows, her small arms are around his neck.

“I can still call-” Touka starts again.

“ _No.”_

 _“_ Haise, Hiro is crawling out of the playing pen again,” Touka cranes her neck, looking over Haise’s shoulder.

“I’ll handle him, you go on ahead.”

“Then go pick him up before he falls!” Touka snaps, flinging aside her bag in favour of undoing the straps on her shoes. Haise turns around and there it is- there is his son, his one year-old  _baby_ who isn’t supposed to be dong stunts like this, with one foot slung over the play-pen’s fence, working furiously to get himself toppled over and onto the tiled floor of the living room, head first.

“Go!” Haise calls over his shoulder as he runs, one arm supporting Hikari, and just manages to reach Hiro as he succeeds in getting his other feet on the top of the fence. 

“I can stay, you know,” Touka sounds worried. When he looks back, she is standing in the hallway, having taken off her shoes.

“No,” Haise says stubbornly. “Go. I can handle it.”

“But-”

“Really Touka-chan. _Go._ Today is Yoriko’s birthday. I will-” he hesitates, “I will call Ayato if I need help.”

“Okay,” she says, but still looks dubious, “call me if anything happens. I’ll come back. And remember to feed them, and you need to give them a shower-”

“I know,” Haise says amidst Hikari’s chant of “pony, pony, pony,” and Hiro trying to squirm out of his hands. “Go, or you’re going to be late.”

* * *

It isn’t as hectic as he imagined it would be, not at first. 

He puts one of the kid’s shows on the television, and Hikari immediately flops down on the sofa, delighted. Haise sits down beside her, and sets Hiro on his lap, and pretty soon, even Hiro looks engrossed in the cartoon. 

For a while, the three of them sit quietly by the TV, and watching as several tattooed ponies run about the screen. They all have silly names which Haise can’t remember for the life of him, and Hikari calls them out every time they appear. “Look papa! Look! It’s Apple bwoom!” and  “Pwincess Wuna is baaaad!” or “Look Hiwo, look at ponies wun.”

After a while, Haise eases Hiro onto the rug infront of the sofa, gives him a toy or two to keep him engrossed in case he gets bored of the TV, and then he goes into the kitchen, where he finds a detailed set of instructions on how to pour Hiro’s already bottled food into a bowl, how to re-heat it, which spoon to take( the little white one with the teddy bear), and how to feed him (do the plane thing). The only thing that is missing, Haise thinks,is the angle at which to hold the spoon. With how Touka is acting, you’d think he’d never taken care of a child, much less fed one. In fact, it is kind of surprising that she isn’t calling him every five minutes.

As if on cue, his phone starts ringing, and sure enough, when he looks at the screen, it is Touka.

“Touka-chan?”

“Yeah, are you doing okay? Did you call Ayato?” she asks. 

“ _Touka-chan_ ,” he can’t help the tone that creeps into his voice. For someone who’d been married to him for almost five years, she sure had faith in him.

“All right, All right,” he hears her sigh through the phone, “remember to feed Hiro, okay? And Hikari’s food is in the fridge.”

“Yeah, I’m on it now,” cradling the phone against his shoulder, Haise opens the fridge and takes out Hikari’s dinner and pops it into the microwave. 

“And Haise, don’t be an idiot,” Touka tells him, “call me if anything goes wrong.”

“I will,” who did she think he was? A child? He’d have her know that he’d taken care of four adolescents just a few years back, and he’d even taken care of Hikari- all by himself- after Touka gave birth to Hiro.  

Somehow, before they’d had kids, he’d never thought he would ever get annoyed with Kirishima Touka, but here they were; Haise Sasaki was annoyed. at Kirishima Touka. 

He hangs up the phone and puts it back in his pocket.He then carries the food back to the living room, stops near the doorway, and stares.

“Papa,” Hikari points at her feet, essentially, at the water she is currently standing in, “there is a puddwe in the house.” Yes, he could see that.

“Puddoo!” Hiro cries happily, running in a circle a little ways away from the ‘puddle’, small, wet footprints following him wherever he went. His diaper is conspicuously missing from his bottom. Haise’s eyes travel back to the puddle his daughter is standing in. Sure enough, there is a discarded diaper next to the small pool of suspciously yellowish-water. “Puddoo!” Hiro says with another giggle.

Haise blinks. 

He’d left them for five minute.  _Five_  minutes.

“Papa? There is a puddwe,” Hikari stamps her feet in the puddle, and little splashes of urine flies up and around.

“Hikari-chan,” Haise says gently, “Hiro went pee-pee. The puddle is pee.”

The reaction is immediate: Hikari shrieks in disgust, leaps out of the puddle and jumps towards Haise, arms extended towards him. “Papa!” she cries, taking hold of a fistful of his pants, and trying to shake the wetness off her foot. 

“It’s okay sweetheart,” he tells her,looking around the living room, looking at Hiro, who is still walking around unsteadily, at all the pee-prints around the room, and at his two children, both covered in it. It most definitely was not okay. And all of this only proved Touka right. 

_No._

With renewed determination, Haise picks up his daughter and moves her into the bathroom. “Stay there, Hikari-chan,” he tells her, wagging a finger, “ _Stay_ , and don’t touch anything, okay? Papa will be back soon.”

Ofcourse Hikari chooses to ignore his words. By the time he brings Hiro to the bathroom- in that span of time, probably less than a minute, he’d wager, she’d managed to turn the tap in the bathtub(not necessarily a bad thing), climb inside the tub in her clothes (not that bad either),  _and_  is squeezing two bottles of shower gel(his and Touka’s) into the tub. 

“Hikawi taking bath” she announces proudly.

 _Children,_ Haise thinks,  _are amazing with the amount of havoc they can wreck within the shortest periods of time._

He sets Hiro down on the floor and removes his T-shirt. Then he puts balances Hiro on the bathtub with one hand, and with some difficulty, manages to get Hikari undressed. It is a wonder in itself how Haise manages to bath the two children, but he does it. He bathes them and dries them, and somehow manages to dress them without any more mishaps. He puts two pairs of pants over Hiro’s diaper, just to be on the safe side, he dries Hikari’s hair, and then, he puts Hiro in his walker- and remembers to put on the belt( he really liked climbing out of things, Hiro did), gives Hikari his phone to play with, and rushes back into the living room to clean up the mess. 

Haise cleans the living room as quickly as he can. rushing back every few minutes to check on his children, who seem to be behaving- for now. After that, he feeds the children- first Hiro, then Hikari. There is a bit of spilled food- nothing Haise can’t handle, thankfully. 

By the time Touka arrives home, both of their children are sleeping (three bedtime stories, several nursery rhymes and one toilet break for Hikari) like little angels, and Haise is exhausted but proud of himself. 

“How did it go? Did they give you a hard time?” Touka asks him later, after she’d returned and woken him up and they’d moved the kids into their beds.

“It went,” Sasaki thinks for a moment,”sasastically.”


	2. The Octopus and the Fairy

Touka is trying her best to follow a fairly simple cake recipe when her eldest child comes into the kitchen and tugs on her dress with a softly uttered, “mummy,” which is unusual in itself. Sure enough, when Touka looks down, Hikari’s eyes are filled with unshed tears and her lips are quivering when she says, “mummy, I don’t want to be an optopus,” sounding, for all the world, like someone who had been given a death sentence. 

It takes Touka a moment to figure out that she means to say ‘octopus’, but when she corrects her, Hikari gets even more upset. 

“I don’t want to be an op-to-pus, mummy,” she repeats, and much to Touka’s surprise, she adds, “but I really love daddy.” Then she bursts into tears.

“An Octupus, honey? Why ever would you think you’d be an octopus?” Touka asks, taking her daughter into her arms, the bowl of flour forgotten on the kitchen counter. She wipes Hikari’s eyes and nose, and strokes her hair, “You’re not going to be an octopus, sweetie, you are a girl.”

“Y-you promise?” 

“You’re a little girl, Hikari,” Touka says firmly, lifting her up and setting her on the kitchen counter. “And girls don’t become octopuses, because girls are people.” By then, Hikari has stopped crying. 

That is the thing with children; how quickly they transition from smiling to a crying mess and then back again. Although, right now, Hikari isn’t smiling, but she doesn’t look like she’s about dissolve into sobs either. Instead, she looks like she is thinking rather hard about something, brows furrowed together, tiny little mouth pulled downwards in a frown. Touka decides to leave her to her thoughts, and begins breaking eggs into the flour. She is measuring out 1 and ¾ cups of sugar when Hikari speaks.  

“Daddy is a boy,” Hikari says, “and you are a girl.”

“That’s right,” Touka replies, adding the sugar into the bowl.

“But daddy’s an optopus, and you’re a fairy,” Hikari is starting to look upset again. “Mummy, you’re wrong,” she shakes her head, “daddy’s a boy  _and_  a optopus, and Amon-san-” here, she starts tearing up again- “says I-I’ll be j-just li-like daddy!” Hikari wipes away her own tears, but more keep replacing them, and it doesn’t take Touka much to figure out that whatever this octopus business was, it had made her daughter very upset.

“Hikari-chan-”

“I don’t  _want_ to be an optopus mummy,” Hikari says sadly, “I want to have wings, like you.”

“Wings? Sweetie-”  _Oh._

_That is what she means._

Touka is almost tempted to laugh when she puts two and two together. Instead, she puts her arms around Hikari and lets her sob into her apron, biting her lips to hide her smile.

“Sweetie, daddy is not an octopus,” she explains, “That is just his Kagune. I think it’s really cool,” she pulls away a little and smiles at Hikari, “don’t you think it’s cool?”

Hikari’s shakes her head slowly, lips jutting out in a little pout, eyes still glistening. “Please don’t tell daddy,” she says after a moment, “I can’t be an optopus mummy.  _Please_. I want to be a fairy like you.”

Touka doesn’t know what to say to this. She isn’t a geneticist, so she has no idea who Hikari will take after, although, judging by the fact that she could eat human food, and had only one kakugan, she supposed it was more likely that Hikari would be an ukaku than a rinkaku.

It turns out she is right

Hikari is ecstatic when she gets her Ukaku less than a year later.

“Look, mummy! Look at my wings!” She would say, twirling about. She refuses to wear pants because “fairies wear dresses, you silly mummy,” and both she and Kaneki are having a hard time convincing her that she couldn’t fly, despite the fact that she’d fallen off several places in the past week.

“But mummy can fly!” Hikari tells Kaneki crossly after he finishes bandaging her knees one afternoon, “why can’t I? I’m a fairy too!”

“Mummy has had a lot of practice,” Kaneki tries to explain, “She can’t fly, but she can manipulate her rc-cells to support her weight when she jumps and she is really good at- um, -jumping and running and things.”

Touka doesn’t think Hikari understands half of what Kaneki says, mostly because she is just four, but she beams with joy when Kaneki offers to teach her how to “become like mummy.” 

That is how her eldest child begins her combat training before she even starts school.


	3. Ordinary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There are things he worries about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Post-canon// Spoilers for recent chapters of :re manga.

There are things he worries about, like:

Did he forget to turn off the stove?

Would they have enough money for the mortgage on the new house? Had he forgotten to do his taxes again?

How is he going to tell her that the cot they picked out is out of stock?

Kaneki finds it oddly comforting to hear her berate him about leaving hair all over the sink,  _again,_ and can’t he clean up after himself? He can grow a damn beard if he couldn’t clean up after shaving because she’d done away with his fancy-ass razor. In fact, she’d broken it in half and put it in the garbage bin.

Yes. It was good to come home to an angry wife. 

“Do you think this is  _funny?”_

Oh. Had he been smiling? He tries his best to look somber, but it is hard to when she looks so angry, and at the same time so disheveled. Her hair is uncombed and piled into the tiniest bun on top of her head, a futile attempt which hadn’t worked very well, if he were to guess by the loose strands around her face and forehead. She’d gained a few pounds in the last couple of months, and with her huge, bulging stomach and bunny slippers, she looks less intimidating and more like an angry puppy. 

“- you  _will_  clean up after your self, _do you hear me?_ ” 

“Yes, Touka-chan,” he said, ruffling her hair as he passed her by. She sighs, resigned, as he gives her a peck on the cheek and steals her cup of coffee. He’d have to make a mental note to wake up earlier so he had enough time to clean up the hair in the sink. But he could always buy another razor. A Touka, though. A Touka would be impossible to find.

It is nice, these little domestic disputes. The little nagging worries that are ordinary, that are not a matter of life and death. He’d take an angry wife over a dead one  _any day._ He’d much rather a Touka that stole his covers when they slept, that got annoyed at all his little antics and worried about keeping the house in order, than the white faced, terrified girl he’d woken up to months before.  He could bear to see her cry over some stupid tv drama instead of having to see her cry over dead loved ones. Not her tears over him.

He never wants to see that again.

Yes. He likes how normal their life has become, how ordinary. 

They are going to have to pick names for the baby soon. He looks forward to arguing about names.

 

 


End file.
